GM's former plant in Lordstown will return to mass vehicle production, thousands of jobs

Lordstown Motors CEO Steve Burns has bold plans to fill the 6.2-million-square-foot facility he bought from General Motors last year. Those plans include both people and products. The CEO said he will start hiring 600 workers next year at the Mahoning Valley plant to build the first 20,000 Endurance all-electric pickups Lordstown Motors is designing. Then, starting in 2022, Burns will hire more people to build other all-electric vehicles, such as SUVs and a midsize pickup, he told the Free Press. "We didn't buy a mass volume plant like this and not plan to fill it up," Burns said. "This is a gem of a building built for volume manufacturing." Burns expects to employ 4,000 to 5,000 people in the plant in the near future based on demand for electric vehicles, adding, "We think the electric pickup is the new normal." Lordstown Motors already has "well over several thousand" pre-orders for the $52,500 Endurance, even before the truck's been revealed, Burns said. The company was set to reveal the Endurance at the Detroit Auto Show next month, but the show was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. So Lordstown Motors will do a "virtual" reveal instead. Burns is targeting late June to do that, and once he does, he expects to take pre-orders for all 20,000 pickups the automaker will build next year. Just three years ago, the Lordstown assembly plant employed about 4,500 workers making GM's Chevrolet Cruze compact car. In its heyday, in the early 1990s, GM employed about 10,600 people at the plant. But on March 6, 2019, the last Cruze rolled off the line. Lordstown was one of four U.S. plants GM said it would shutter as it ended production of some of its cars to accommodate shifting consumer tastes to SUVs and pickups. GM's Detroit Hamtramck was supposed to also be one of those four to close, but during UAW contract talks, GM agreed to invest $3 billion in it to make an electric pickup and SUVs there. Most of the 1,600 workers left at Lordstown last spring were transferred to other GM plants across the country. Then, GM sold the facility to Lordstown Motors. The plant and adjoining five parcels of land sold for $20 million, according to local records. GM had an option to lease the Lordstown facilities and land as well as the option to repurchase the assets. But GM will not exercise those options, Dan Flores, GM spokesman told the Free Press, adding, "We're not taking the plant back." Lordstown Motors presently employs about 70 people, nearly all engineers, some of whom were engineers there when GM owned the plant, Burns said. Twenty of those engineers work in a secret design studio the company has in Dearborn, Michigan, making clay modelings of the future vehicles. The other 50 engineers are in the plant directing the change-over of the tooling needed to make the Endurance instead of the Cruze, Burns said. They are scrambling because, after the late June reveal of the Endurance, Lordstown Motors has to produce 30 pre-production vehicles by December. "We're six months away from that, so that is a push," Burns said. ——— ©2020 the Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio) Visit the Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio) at www.ohio.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.